The dream is free…

…but the hustle is sold separately. I love this picture that was doing the rounds on Twitter this morning.

In English-English we would say something like ideas are cheap, and execution is everything. This is soooo much better. Dreams are more exciting than ideas and ‘hustle’ captures the work of startups much better than ‘execution’, particularly at the early stages.

One of the things that has worked well for many of the day-zero/solo-founder investments we make is to launch a concierge MVP where products are sold and manually delivered. That’s pure hustle. Hustle to find customers, to sell them, and then to deliver. Sometimes this place is buzzing with hustle as people work the phones. The learning that comes from that is immense and I love it.